A Fatal Inversion

by Ruth Rendell

  I am not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine. I am I and you are you. And if we find each other that’s beautiful, if not, it can’t be helped. Something like that, he might not have got it entirely right, there might have been more of it. It was called the Gestalt prayer and Vivien pinned it up on the kitchen wall. Rufus had laughed and said how did anyone know, that might be why one was in this world, why not? But Zosie had liked it and said she longed for people to live that way and Shiva nodded sagely.

  “Love is about allowing,” said Vivien. “Love is about letting people be free. You leave the cage door open and if you’re really loved, the bird flies back to be with you. That’s the only kind of love worth having.”

  Rufus had seen something like that printed on a T-shirt, so he did not receive it with the awed gravity of the others—well, not Adam. He winked at Adam behind Vivien’s back and Adam half-grinned back.

  “You weren’t very allowing about me shooting birds,” he said.

  “That’s different,” Vivien said, frowning. She was quite without a sense of humor. Her small, earnest face was often puckered with worry about moral questions. She pondered on such matters as Jesuitical responses, half-truths, on doing good by stealth so that the mind may avoid a consciousness of virtue. “I said I’d go out, anyway. I didn’t say I’d stop you.”

  She had wanted to organize them, to give them all appointed household tasks, like a big family or a kibbutz. There would be a rota pinned up on the wall beside the Gestalt prayer. And the day was to begin with meditation; she would teach them to meditate, an appropriate mantra provided for each. Of course no one had agreed to any of this; even Shiva, usually meek and obliging, had rebelled. Picking all the fruit and selling it at the top of the drift, coppicing the wood to get timber for winter fires, learning to weave, keeping a goat, growing potatoes, all these ideas of Vivien’s were met with incredulity, then with firm refusals. It was too hot, it would be too boring, it was much easier to sell Hilbert’s silver.

  No one changed their ways. They went on drinking and smoking and lying in the sun, swimming in the lake, and going on pub sprees and then on selling and buying trips. It might have been expected that Vivien, finding that nobody was interested in truly communal living, in working to be self-supporting, which was the idea, might herself have yielded and joined in. But she never had. Without support and without much in the way of thanks, she cooked for them and baked bread, cleaned the rooms and took the bedlinen to the launderette in Sudbury. She did not explain why until pressed.

  “It’s to earn my keep. I can’t contribute any cash.”

  No one else thought of it in those terms.

  And yet Vivien had no intention of staying at Ecalpemos. Perhaps she might have if the set-up had been different, if it had been more like her idea of a commune. But that would have meant foregoing the job she had already applied for. Shiva would not stay either, for whether he continued with his pharmacology course or gave it up for medicine, he would have to return eventually and present himself submissively to his father. For his part, Rufus intended to be back by the first week of October, if not sooner, to enter his fourth year at University College Hospital. Only Adam would remain—and Zosie. Adam and Zosie, orphans of the storm, the babes in the wood.

  One afternoon, looking for his secret drink which he had hidden on some sill or shelf, behind a curtain or a row of ornaments, Rufus came upon them embraced. They were on the sofa, lying close, lost in each other, their faces joined at searching, sucking mouths. He looked at them for a moment or two, feeling ever so slightly a pang of envy, of the rejection such a sight induces in all but the continuously satiated. And then it was gone and he was grinning at them. But they were oblivious of him, they did not see him, fused together as they were, striving to make their separate bodies one. For a long while that day they disappeared together, returning to the company quite late at night, vague-faced and with smiling, glazed eyes. There were candles burning on the terrace, candles that were set in saucers between the statuary. Vivien sat cross-legged, Shiva had his own candle to read his math book by, Rufus had just opened a fresh bottle of wine. Such pleasure, the withdrawing of the cork, the first pouring! The air was full of moths, soft-winged, dusky, feathery, floating on the candlelight as if made languid by the warmth. The moon was rising, a huge red orb, ascending with mysterious aplomb out of the dark low hills crested with black woodland. Adam came put of the house and sat beside him, and then he saw Zosie standing in the shimmer of the candlelight, her arms wound around one of the heads of Zeus, his curls of stone, his flowing beard, her head lifted to gaze at the red moon. In that shiny, slippery light she looked herself like a statue, only one made of bronze, fey-faced, nymphlike, unreal.

  “Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”

  Rufus looked at him. “Bloody hell,” he said.

  He didn’t sleep on the terrace that night. He knew he would find the Centaur Room empty. And when he went to bed at last, the remains of the last bottle of wine with him, he found that Zosie’s things had gone. He opened all the windows to get rid of the smell of her that was salty and flowery like the smell of a child.

  At home, his dinner eaten, Rufus went to the cabinet and fetched himself a second drink, identical to the first which he had left in the room called Marigold’s studio, where the television was. She was watching Bookmark on television because there was a segment on it about a now quite famous poet that her mother had once lived next door to. This double measure, slightly diluted in a squat spirit glass, would be his evening’s “secret drink” to be tasted immediately and then concealed behind the hem of a curtain or among Marigold’s proliferating houseplant pots and swigged from at intervals until bedtime. At times of stress Rufus indulged in this neurotic behavior even when he was alone. Of course he knew it was neurotic but he did not particularly on this account wish to change it. At some point, when the level in the secret glass fell below the halfway mark, he would secretly recharge it, putting in another single measure of vodka. The legitimate or above-board drink was to be sipped from in front of Marigold and made to last the whole evening. The thing about all this that did cause Rufus some anxiety was the disproportionate excitement and actual happiness, a kind of exultant glee, having this hidden drink brought him.

  He sat down on the settee next to Marigold. Poets did not interest him much because they were not, in his view, commercially successful or entertaining or possessed of obvious intellectual superiority. This one, small and bearded, stood at a lectern reading from his own works. Adam, as far as Rufus knew, had never written poetry but he used to recite it sometimes and Vivien had wanted them to devote an evening to each of them reading aloud their favorite poetry. Rufus had soon squashed that. They had lain out there in the garden long into the small hours, everyone unwilling to go to bed, until a lightening appeared in the sky, a pale glow that gradually suffused it and Adam with his arm around Zosie, who had fallen asleep with her head on his chest, said in a vague remote voice: “I suffer from eosophobia.”

  “From what?”

  “An irrational fear of the dawn.”

  Rufus wondered what had made him remember that. Something the poet on the screen had said perhaps. That was the day, the next day rather, when Vivien had her interview with Robin Tatian. Of course they had all wanted to sleep on and on and Rufus would have stayed in bed until the afternoon but Vivien came in and woke him, had shaken him awake, then presented him with coffee and breakfast on a tray, reminding him he had promised to drive her to London.

  Wasn’t it rather strange that it had been he and Vivien and Zosie who had gone, leaving Adam and Shiva behind? Not that there had ever been any question of Shiva’s going. Off on one of his exploratory walks, he had on that afternoon discovered the animal cemetery. Adam, Rufus seemed to remember, had balked at going to London, anyway to North London, on the grounds that he might encounter one or both of his parents, who believed him to be
in Greece.

  Vivien, before she came to Ecalpemos, had applied for a job as nanny to the child of a man who lived in Highgate called Robin Tatian. Tatian was an architect and presumably a successful one and rich, to judge by the address on View Road. Rufus and Adam both knew the neighborhood well, having been to Highgate School. It seemed strange to Rufus now that he had never seen Tatian, but knew what he looked like only from Vivien’s description when she came back from the interview.

  “He’s tall and suntanned and he’s got brown curly hair. About thirty-five.”

  “Sounds yummy,” said Zosie.

  “I didn’t actually see him,” Vivien said. “The woman showed me a photograph of him with the baby. She’s his sister. She said she ‘handled all the staff for him.’”

  “A snooty bitch by the sound.”

  Tatian had probably been at his office or studio or wherever architects worked. It was a Thursday, the third or fourth week of July, Rufus thought. And the hot weather went on and on. They had all Goblander’s windows open and it wasn’t too much, even when he was driving quite fast up the A12. The girls sat in the back because they hadn’t been able to decide which one should sit in the front with him.

  “I’m saving up to go to India,” Vivien said. “If I save up all my salary for six months I’ll get enough to go to India. If I don’t spend anything and I needn’t, I’ll be living in.”

  “What do you want to go to India for?”

  “There’s this mystic—well, a saddhu. I’ve read about him. People go to him and learn, lots of people.” Vivien became reticent and embarrassed but she went on explaining, her voice getting low. “I would go and live there and it would be a start for me. I might stay there or I might come back here, I don’t know, but if I never go I shall feel I’ve missed my chance, I’d regret it all my life.”

  “Is there some sort of ashram there for you to stay in?” Rufus asked. “I mean, will you wear yellow robes and ring a little brass bell?”

  When he mocked her she reacted by treating his remarks as if they had been perfectly serious. It wasn’t a bad technique either, he had to admit it. If it was a technique. If it wasn’t, which was what he suspected, a simple lack of even a rudimentary sense of humor.

  “I shall take a room in the village,” she said.

  “You will make yourself ill,” said the doctor in Rufus, “on unwholesome food and infected water and very likely get amoebic dysentery.”

  “I don’t think so. I shall be careful.”

  “Well, at least you don’t say what does the welfare of the body matter compared to the soul.”

  “I’m not stupid,” said Vivien, and Zosie said, “I wish I could go with you!”

  Rufus couldn’t see Vivien because she was in the back and he was driving but he imagined she must be holding out her arms in hieratic fashion and smiling with uplifted eyes as she uttered the single word: “Come!”

  The interview was to be at Tatian’s house at three o’clock. Vivien was wearing the bright blue dress with the embroidered bodice and her hair was plaited and wound tightly around her head. She looked like a minor character in a Rosetti painting, one of the maidens holding up the canopy in Dante’s Dream perhaps, not at all the prospective nanny. This picture was one of the few Rufus could actually recognize. A reproduction of it hung in his parents’ house and, curiously enough, now in his. Marigold, the first time he took her home, expressed enthusiasm, fervor, for this painting. Afterward she told him she was just being polite. But the result was that his mother gave it to Marigold as part of her wedding present and it now hung in a corner of the hall. As the poet faded from the screen, Rufus got up and went out into the hall, pausing on the way for a nip from the secret drink.

  Rufus could no longer see any resemblance. The girls in the painting were both redheaded, one wore a dress of a pale lettuce green, the other’s was a darker, bluer shade. And the pale, delicate faces with their wistful expressions were more like Zosie’s than Vivien’s. Rufus closed his eyes. Vivien had just the two dresses, one of cream cheesecloth and that blue one, both with long skirts, square necks, full sleeves which, in those hot days, she wore rolled up to the upper arms, to the shoulders. He couldn’t remember that he had ever seen her legs. But her feet he remembered and her thin, bony ankles. As often as not she went barefoot. That day, though, she was wearing blue cotton espadrilles.

  “Have you got any references?” Zosie said, a display of worldly knowledge that had rather surprised Rufus.

  “I’ve looked after someone’s baby before. She’d give me a reference, I think. I’m going to give her address if I’m asked.”

  He hadn’t been able to see Zosie any more than he had Vivien, and it was hindsight that made him recall a stricken face, a faltering note as she asked: “Do you like babies?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m a woman.”

  Rufus burst out laughing.

  “It isn’t funny. Women naturally like babies.”

  Zosie always spoke with great simplicity. She was like a child, yet more straightforward, more naïve. “Why doesn’t his wife look after her baby?”

  “I suppose she’s too rich,” said Vivien. “The baby’s got a nanny now but she’s leaving soon. There’s another child, a bit older.”

  Returning to Marigold, Rufus took a longer pull at the vodka behind the curtain, then decided it was in need of recharging. He took the glass to the bottle, not the bottle to the glass. This is the way of all secret drinkers who will thus not, or less probably, be caught with a bottle in their hands. The glass he restored to its niche behind the curtain hem.

  It was then, as they came into the far eastern suburbs of London, Romford and Ilford and Newbury Park, that he had thought of drawing Zosie out, of eliciting from her the answers to a few questions. The time seemed ripe, the conversation tending in appropriate directions. And he had started in with: “That wouldn’t do for you, Zosie. You wouldn’t have anything to do with babies, would you?”

  The silence was long. The traffic was getting thick, three lanes of it, brakes groaning and squeaking as it pulled up at lights. As if she had been drowning, coming up with a gasp to clutch at a lifeline, in the voice of someone whose head has been underwater, Zosie said: “I would. I’d like six, I’d like twelve.”

  That made him laugh. They were stopped at a red light. He turned around and looked at the two girls, at Vivien, who had taken Zosie in her arms and was holding her. It was so hot he could see a wet patch on Zosie’s back where the sweat had come through her T-shirt. Vivien’s strong, capable hands, large for someone so small, held her shoulders with maternal sureness, not patting in an embarrassed way, which is what most people do when called to take part in a spontaneous hug.

  They delivered her to View Road. The house was called Cranmer Lodge, white, with a green-tiled roof and green iron balconies. Topiaried trees cut in tiers, cones of thick dark plates, stood on either side of the front door. The front gates were of wrought iron and there were stone pineapples on the gate pillars.

  Zosie, who had been silent in the back except for an occasional muffled sound that might have been crying, said, “I love that house. Isn’t it lovely?”

  It was big, Rufus had thought, you could say that for it, imposing and rather pretentious. He had been back there just once and that was to pick Vivien up an hour and a half later. But never again, never nearer than North Hill out of which View Road turned and on that occasion he had been taking one of the routes out of London up to the North Circular Road. The district had an unpleasant feel as if—and this was more a typical Adam reaction—it were full of eyes and memories. The school years were lost, the later days remembered. He wouldn’t dream of considering moving to Highgate, which Marigold had suggested.

  Sitting down next to her, he tried to think where they had gone, Zosie and he. They had gone somewhere to kill time while Vivien was in that house—some big store it had been, or group of big stores, some shopping center. It might have been Brent Cross, or John Barnes
which, at that time, had still been at Swiss Cottage.

  “When did Brent Cross open?” he asked Marigold.

  She turned to him, astonished. “What made you ask that?”

  “I don’t know. When did it?”

  “I was still at school,” she said. “I was only about eleven, I think.”

  So it might have been Brent Cross. He had a distinct memory of somewhere that was air-conditioned. You hardly ever needed air conditioning in an English summer, but you did that year. The van he had parked nearby, in a car park he thought, which argued for its being Brent Cross, and now he recalled a central hall and escalators, and a feeling of excited anticipation, the stomach muscles tautening. Zosie would steal something and he wanted to see her do it. He found himself observing her as one might watch the behavior of a laboratory animal in a drug trial. All desire he had ever had for her was dead. He would not even have cared to touch her.

  In and out of shops they had wandered—or simply through the departments of stores? A food department he could remember and all those clothes and the crowds and the heat. So perhaps there had been no air conditioning or only part air conditioning. If Zosie took anything from a shelf or out of one of those bins filled with stockings, with panty hose, with underclothes, he didn’t see her. He lit a cigarette and a man in a suit with a lapel badge came and asked him to put it out. Then the message came over the public address system. The exact words he had forgotten but the gist of it he remembered.